Saturday, October 20, 2012

Thanks to the new voter ID law passed by Scott Walker, background
checks on voter registration workers is a whole lot more difficult and no
longer centralized. But what the heck, that nonexistent problem we had with
workers signing people up to vote in multiple districts was just too
much...to count?

Now we've got more chaos from the unintended consequences of
passing purely partisan ideological laws.

jsonline: Three felons - including one man convicted of multiple
counts of forgery - have had their status revoked as voter registration workers
in Milwaukee and have been referred to county prosecutors after the Journal
Sentinel flagged their criminal backgrounds to city officials.

Here’s the problem:

Neil Albrecht, executive director of the Milwaukee Election
Commission, said his agency does not run criminal background checks on deputies
when they are signed up…

Who hatched this nonsensical law to prevent…what?

As part of legislation requiring voters to show photo ID at
the polls, Republican legislators and Gov. Scott Walker last year changed state
law to make it harder for voter registration workers to move between
communities in Wisconsin … But makes it harder for watchdogs such as the
Journal Sentinel to easily gather information about who is now doing voter
registration work.

The old system needed to change? Yes, too many people voted.

Previously, a volunteer or worker seeking to register voters
in more than one community could simply get training from the state Government
Accountability Board and be certified to register voters across the entire
state rather than in a single community. Now these workers don't have that
option and have to go to clerks or election officials in each of Wisconsin's
roughly 1,800 municipalities to work in those jurisdictions, no matter how
small.

That scatters the records on who is serving as registration
deputies in clerk's offices around the state and makes it harder to run checks
on them as the newspaper did in 2010.